Denver and the West

Anti-terror fight takes to the seas

Peterson Air Force Base - A federal agent working with port authorities in South Asia sounded the warning: A cargo container had tripped sensors that detect possible chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The container was gliding west through the Mediterranean Sea on a ship bound for New York.

Here, at the military's homeland defense headquarters in Colorado Springs, surveillance crews melded that tip with radar and satellite data. Surrounded by wall-sized screens, the high-tech trackers located the ship and followed it across the Atlantic Ocean.

About 200 miles off the East Coast, Coast Guard forces intercepted and boarded the freighter and searched the cargo containers until they knew all of them were safe.

Military officials wouldn't say more about this classified incident that occurred in November, but the way it was handled begins to reveal how secretive military forces in Colorado - the center for airspace surveillance through the Cold War - increasingly target the high seas to reduce what commanders see as a major vulnerability.

This is part of broadening military activity driven by U.S. Northern Command, or Northcom, to confront a wider array of security threats that are as varied as computer hackers and suicide bombers.

Northcom commanders contend terrorists will try to hijack ships and use them to smuggle people and weapons, or turn the vessels into giant floating bombs.

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Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently granted new authority to Navy Adm. Timothy Keating - commander of both Northcom and the U.S.- Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD - to call up aircraft carriers, submarines and other sea craft for maritime operations to deter and disrupt enemies and collect intelligence.

High-seas surveillance soon will expand, deploying new fleets of unmanned aerial drones and blimps with infrared capabilities over oceans, Keating said in an interview.

"Our job is to deter and prevent any and all attacks on the United States, whatever the means. We have thousands of miles of coastline. ... We have radar that can track an airplane. ... For us to do our mission, we felt we needed to ramp up maritime domain awareness," Keating said.

Today, NORAD crews still scan airspace imagery, much of it sent from Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora. They scramble fighter jets several times a week in response to possible threats, such as a private plane flying near Air Force One.

This is the first in a three-day series on U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, both based at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, and their efforts to prepare for 21st-century threats to the nation's security.

Day 1: Northcom expands its mission to monitor the high seas for terrorist threats aboard ships worldwide.

Day 2: The future of NORAD's complex, located deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, and its 50-year mission to watch the skies are in question as the nation's homeland defense priorities evolve.

Day 3: Northcom quietly prepares to respond to a disease pandemic that could sicken or kill millions of Americans and makes plans to protect the health of the nation's military forces.

Northcom surveillance crews, working in a new operations center at Peterson Air Force Base, scan growing amounts of airspace, maritime and other data integrated with intelligence from spy agencies, the FBI and others.

Officials from those agencies work at Northcom headquarters.

Fusing this data to track ships and land threats - such as suspected suicide bombers - is essential to protecting Americans, said Anthony Cordesman, a veteran defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

"Your worst-case threats don't yet exist. You have to deal with all kinds of low-level activity and possibilities," Cordesman said.

"To even begin to create the capability (of effective homeland defense), you have to make a fundamental change to cover land borders, ports, seas, coasts and the air. If you miss any of those, you don't have homeland defense."

Each year, some 7,500 foreign- flag ships make 51,000 calls at U.S. ports. They deliver millions of cargo containers that move by rail and truck across the nation.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, security officials have been wrestling with the possibility that enemies could use ships to smuggle weapons and people.

To help counter the potential threat, federal agents have been deployed at 44 ports worldwide. Customs officials also use a computerized targeting system to review shipping manifests, identifying potentially dangerous containers for inspection.

Now, military forces are getting more involved supporting these efforts by tracking and intercepting ships. Last year, U.S. naval forces boarded more than 2,000 vessels, according to congressional testimony by Pentagon officials.

By posting agents in foreign ports, "you get the smell and the flavor" of a port, but agents can be tricked, said Navy Cmdr. Robert Nestlerode, a former nuclear submarine chief now working at Northcom. Terrorists on ships also can elude surveillance by turning off transponder beacons, he said.

Maritime specialists at Northcom said that in October 2001, Italian police seized a Canada- bound ship from Egypt at an Italian port. Aboard, they found an Egyptian man hiding in a cargo container equipped with a bed, toilet, cell and satellite telephones, Canadian passports, airplane tickets and an airline mechanic's certificate valid for airports in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Italian authorities released the Egyptian on bail, then he disappeared.

Yet, "we can't afford to have a 9/11 in the maritime domain," Farrell said. "We're looking at all avenues to make those containers visible. ... A lot of our next steps are classified. We're trying to be a little more anticipatory."

The scope of these operations is global, looking increasingly beyond coastal waters to vital shipping routes, such as the Red Sea, where piracy is on the rise.

Even nuclear submarines, built to deter an attack by the Soviet Union, may be rolled into homeland defense.

A few years ago, U.S. forces - including a sub - trailed a North Korean ship off Yemen, near Osama bin Laden's ancestral homelands. Eavesdropping U.S. crews heard every sneeze. When Spanish forces raided the ship, they found Scud missiles.

"A submarine can approach in a very clandestine manner and track (a ship) if need be," Keating said. If Northcom crews observe a ship "behaving erratically" with cargo that isn't on a manifest, "or it has been alongside another ship that we don't trust," calling in a nuclear-powered attack submarine might make sense, he said.

All would assist, he added, in the overriding goal of "being able to respond with increasing rapidity as far away from our shores as possible."

Peterson Air Force Base is nation's eyes on land, seas, skies and space

NORTHCOM

Launched to fight terrorism at home in 2002, U.S. Northern Command became fully operational a year later. Northcom - based at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs - is responsible for land, aerospace and sea defense of the United States.

Operations include global surveillance as well as support of civil authorities in dealing with attacks and natural disasters.

Northcom is one of several regional commands that coordinate U.S. military operations in various parts of the world. Its area of operations includes the United States, Canada, Mexico, parts of the Caribbean and surrounding waters out to 500 miles.

About 950 men and women, 360 of them civilian, serve at Northcom headquarters. Its annual budget is about $70 million.

Northcom forces also include an 87-member civil-support task force based at Fort Monroe, Va., and a 140-member counterdrug task force at Fort Bliss, Texas.

Another 30 Northcom personnel serve on a force protecting Washington.

Northcom calls up outside military units for operations and activities worldwide.

In addition to air, land and sea surveillance, Northcom commanders have run dozens of operations, including training drills nationwide with local first-responders and simulated response exercises with military commanders. Recent operations also included border patrol and helping victims of Hurricane Katrina.

NORAD

Peterson is also headquarters of the U.S.-Canadian North American Aerospace Defense Command. Since 1958, NORAD crews have scanned North American skies for incoming warplanes and missiles from an operations center deep inside Cheyenne Mountain on the southwest side of Colorado Springs.

Those operations now include surveillance of U.S. airspace.

Much of the satellite data used by NORAD surveillance crews comes from Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora.

U.S. Navy Adm. Timothy Keating commands both Northcom and NORAD

Space Command

The U.S. Air Force Space Command also is based at Peterson, overseeing units nationwide, including the Space Warfare Center, which conducts missile-defense work, and the 50th Space Wing, which runs military satellites, both based at Schriever Air Force Base, east of Colorado Springs.

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